The strong U.S. jobs market through 2023 and early 2024 was a bit less strong than thought, providing a very brief, very modest bump to the sluggish price action in bitcoin (BTC) during mid-morning U.S. trading.
According to the latest revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. added 818,000 less jobs than previously thought for the period from March 2023 to March 2024. That means jobs growth for that one year period of 2.1 million versus prior reports of 2.9 million, or average monthly growth of 174,000 against the previous 242,000.
A very top level interpretation of the data: a weaker than thought economy leads to easier than expected Federal Reserve monetary policy leads to higher than otherwise bitcoin prices.
The devil, of course, is in the details, and Goldman Sachs – anticipating the sizable downward adjustment – earlier this week explained why the revisions themselves were as likely as the originally reported numbers to be erroneous. The true monthly pace of jobs growth, according to the bank, is likely to have been 200,000-240,000, a perfectly acceptable number in a growing economy.
Bitcoin briefly knee-jerked higher by about 1% to as much as $60,000 as the data hit the tape, but quickly reversed, resuming its flat-to-downward price action of the past weeks. At press time, it was trading at $59,300, down 0.4% over the past 24 hours.
